The Fall of Paris

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The Fall of Paris Page 33

by Alistair Horne


  Ducrot had arrived on the scene, and as usual was observed conspicuously mounted on his white charger, well ahead of his troops; once again, his incredible good luck preserved him unscathed, but his temerity did nothing to alter the course of the battle. With comparable courage, two women serving as cantinières seized the chassepots of fallen soldiers, and themselves fell in the front rank. There were grimmer scenes recorded that day. Trochu’s aide, Captain d’Hérisson, was struggling with a mount unnerved by a near miss, when he saw his orderly gallop past him: ‘He was still in the saddle. But one of the fragments of the shell had torn away the whole of the lower part of his stomach, and had carried away his intestines. The upper part of his body was only attached to the lower part by the spinal column, and there was an enormous red, gaping space from his sides to his thighs. He threw up his arms and fell, while his horse, hit in the withers, galloped off into space to the accompaniment of the clink of the empty stirrups. A cold shiver ran through me.’ To Labouchere, ‘The most painful scene during the battle was the sight1 of a French soldier felled by French bullets. He was a private in the 119th Battalion, and refused to advance. His commander remonstrated. The private shot him. General Bellemare, who was near, ordered the man to be killed at once. A file was drawn up and fired on him; he fell, and was supposed to be dead. Some brancardiers soon afterwards passing by, and thinking that he had been wounded in the battle, placed him on a stretcher. It was then discovered that he was still alive. A soldier went up to him to finish him off, but his gun missed fire. He was then handed another, when he blew out the wretched man’s brains.’

  On the whole, and particularly at Montretout, the National Guard had fought with unexpected distinction. But on Bellemare’s crucial front, Bowles now witnessed an ominous occurrence;

  … on the crest of the hill, the fighting was going on heavily, and our first line, composed of Mobiles, was skirmishing in the woods some thirty yards in front. Just then a regiment of National Guards was brought up by an aide-de-camp to support them, and very pretty they looked, coming up the hill at a run, with fixed bayonets, the colonel puffing heavily in front, and the aide-de-camp brandishing his sabre and cheering them on. When they got a little below me, however, and began to hear the balls singing past their heads, they ducked to a man, with unanimity that was positively comic, slackened speed, stopped by common consent, and then falling flat on their stomachs, opened fire to the front on the Mobiles!’

  It was not the only episode where the wretchedly trained National Guard lost its head. In one regiment observed by d’Hérisson, ‘the drummer beat the charge; the colonel gave the word of command, ‘En avant!’ the regiment shouted, ‘Vive la République!’, and—nobody stirred. That went on for three hours—Ducrot appeared on the scene in person and shouted ‘En avant!’ He was answered by shouts, but nobody moved.’ A Colonel Rochebrune was killed by what was later asserted to be a bullet from one of the tabatière muskets issued to the National Guard; and as darkness fell, Trochu’s own party was fired upon by some disorientated National Guards, who claimed to have mistaken them for Uhlans, and a young lieutenant, de Langle de Cary, received a bullet through the chest.

  It was virtually the last salute that Trochu would receive from his army. That night he recognized the Buzenval sortie had failed, and the next morning orders to withdraw were issued. But it was more than the Army’s tenuous threads of discipline could withstand. Wrote Ducrot:

  Hardly was the word retreat pronounced than in the rear areas on the left the débâcle began… everything broke up, everything went…. On the roads the muddle was terrifying… across the open country the National Guards were taking to their heels in every direction…. Soldiers, wandering, lost, searched for their company, their officers.

  As the National Guard streamed through the streets of Paris there were once again those piteous cries of ‘Nous sommes trahis’, and this time few Parisians doubted that they were nearly at the end of the line. The Buzenval battlefield presented a horrible spectacle; members of the American Ambulance told Washburn ‘the whole country was literally covered with the dead and wounded, and five hundred ambulances were not half sufficient to bring them away’. Trochu called for an armistice of two or three days, but there were those who claimed that he did so as much to underline the facts of life to the Reds as to bury the dead. The facts were certainly shocking enough; for a total of only 700 Prussian casualties, the French had lost over 4,000 in dead and wounded, of which 1,500 were from the National Guard. After the war Trochu testified that in his estimate they had themselves been responsible for one-eighth of the French casualties, but there was no doubting that in its aim of the ‘bleeding’ of the National Guard the Government had been eminently successful. To O’Shea it was ‘an indisputable crime’ to throw in the National Guard at Buzenval, and few of his fellow correspondents disagreed with him.

  Bowles accompanied the defeated, bedraggled army back inside the city walls: ‘On my return to Paris I found the Avenue de la Grande Armée lined on each side by a dense crowd of people eager for news…. They listened sadly in little groups to the complaints of marching, counter-marching, hunger, want of rest, and bad leadership which constitute the staple of the National Guards’ account of the affair.’ Earlier another Englishman, William Brown, had remarked on a disturbing new phenomenon in Paris: ‘Since last night a strange change has come over the city; an enormous number of troops have left last night and some cannonading took place late, but gradually died away towards morning. All the National Guard have left; a terrible silence reigns around; not a shot is heard and everybody demands what this means; can it be that we are at last victorious and have forced the enemy’s positions and so are fighting beyond the lines, and in consequence out of hearing? Or can it be a calamity too sad to think of…?’ By the 21st, all Paris knew what the silence signified; it was, explained Goncourt, ‘the silence of death, of the kind caused by a disaster in a great city. Today one no longer hears Paris live. All faces have the look of faces of the sick, of convalescents’. More simply, Juliette Lambert just wrote: ‘Paris est perdu!’

  Trochu had returned on the afternoon of the 20th from his battle-post at Mont-Valérien where, as he said in a superlative piece of understatement, ‘my presence was no longer useful’. Immediately a joint session of the Government and the Mayors of Paris was summoned, at which he was called upon ‘to explain myself concerning the military situation and my personal intentions’. Trochu replied that militarily all was lost, and that he himself ‘formally refused to assume the responsibility for any new operation which would be a slaughter without any goal that was strategically justifiable’. The meeting became stormier than any in the past, with coals of fire heaped from all sides upon the Governor’s head for the failure of the Buzenval sortie. Particularly violent in their recriminations were the Mayors, led by one Georges Clemenceau of Montmartre, who still demanded a continuation of the war at all costs, saying much the same thing with the same degree of savagery as, when Premier of France forty-seven years later, he would growl, ‘Moi, je fais la guerre’. But the influential Favre, Trochu’s deputy, now favoured capitulation; for, during Buzenval, he had received word that Chanzy had been utterly crushed at Le Mans, losing 10,000 men. The Army of the Loire no longer existed. Now a bitter and unseemly scene took place between the two leaders, with Favre reproaching Trochu for his promise that he would ‘never surrender’, and Trochu retaliating by blaming Favre for his insistence that he would ‘cede neither an inch of territory nor a stone of our fortresses’. Dorian, who relayed the episode to Rochefort, admitted that, in spite of the pain it caused him, he felt an almost irresistible desire to laugh ‘when he heard them throw their respective boastings in each other’s face’.

  But on one point all factions were agreed: Trochu must go. When it was put to him, the General declared that it would be inconsistent with military honour for him to resign. The Government must replace him. After lengthy discussions, the following compromise was arrived at
: Trochu would be relieved of his military command, but retain the Presidency; on the other hand, the Governorship of Paris would be suppressed. This last represented a final resort to casuistry that was as typical of this Government of lawyers as it was remarkable. When Trochu had made his rash promise, he declared, ‘The Governor of Paris will not capitulate’; therefore, it was argued with that insuperable logic of the French, if the Governor no longer existed, no promise would be broken. The way to capitulation was now open; although some of the British in Paris were reminded of Byron’s immortally cynical line from Don Fuan, ‘And whispering “I will ne’er consent”—consented’. But who would replace Trochu? Finally it was decided that the tough old Commander, Vinoy, would take over the military reins and that to Favre would be entrusted the invidious task of negotiating an armistice.

  As Trochu left his headquarters, his staff were shocked to hear him mutter with uncharacteristic profanity about his sacrifice, ‘Je suis le Jésus-Christ de la situation!’ On the 22nd, Edward Blount called to find him calm but abandoned, alone ‘with Madame Trochu and one faithful member of his staff’, but still exuding a curious kind of self-satisfaction; ‘He asked me whether I would ever have thought it possible, with the kind of army left in Paris, demoralised, half starved, with nothing in abundance, except drink, to make an effectual stand against the splendid and highly disciplined troops of the invaders’. Few mourned the departure of this Hamlet among generals, who had led Paris, for better or for worse, from the first days of the Siege. Labouchere was among the kindest when he commented, ‘So poor Jonah has gone over, and been swallowed up by the whale.’ Victor Hugo, who had been responsible for many of the crueller puns on Trochu’s name running round Paris—such as ‘trop lu’, or ‘the past participle of the verb trop choir’1—composed a mocking little epitaph:

  … Soldat brave, honnête, pieux, nul,

  Bon canon, mais ayant un peu trop de recul…2

  Washburne wrote, ‘Trochu is dethroned, having remained long enough to injure the cause’, and later added that he had ‘proved himself the weakest and most incompetent man ever entrusted with such great affairs… too weak for anything, weak as the Indian’s dog which had to lean against a tree to bark’. But Trochu had never had any tree against which he could have leaned. Although he ‘had much to answer for’, as O’Shea noted rather more charitably, ‘in the entire cabinet there was but one good Minister, Dorian—that because he was a practical man, a man of business. The rest were phrasers and praters.’ Wickham Hoffman, who regarded Trochu as ‘a strange compound of learning, ability, weakness, and fanaticism, and I have little doubt that he confidently anticipated the personal intervention of Ste.-Genevieve to save her beloved city’, also reckoned that ‘had Vinoy or Ducrot been in command from the beginning, the result might have been different’. But nobody was under any illusion that the advent of Vinoy could affect the issue now; it was, said Goncourt, simply ‘the changing of doctors when the invalid was on the point of death’.

  As Vinoy took over, Belleville, still overflowing with rage at the futile slaughter of its National Guards, and realization of the imminence of surrender, burst out in its last—and most violent—revolt of the Siege. Shortly before one o’clock on the morning of January 22nd, a band of armed men appeared at the gates of the Mazas prison and demanded the release of Flourens and the others imprisoned after October 31st. They induced the prison Governor to receive a deputation of three or four men; these promptly seized the gates and let in their comrades. The Governor (who seems to have acted with remarkable feebleness, and was indeed later arrested for complicity) handed over Flourens and the rest, merely requesting a ‘receipt for their bodies’. With drums beating, the insurgents then marched to the Mairie of the 20th arrondissement, where they pillaged all the food and wine stored there and set up a headquarters. In the course of the night, Flourens prudently evaporated, but the following afternoon his liberators headed—once more—for the Hôtel de Ville. Delescluze, Arnould, and other Red leaders had been conferring at a nearby house on the Rue de Rivoli, while, as usual, Blanqui was detachedly watching developments from a nearby restaurant. As on past occasions, the demonstrations began peacefully enough; there was much angry invective hurled against the Government, intermingled with cries of ‘Donnez-nous du pain!’ No member of the Government was in the Hôtel de Ville, so a deputy of Ferry, Gustave Chaudey, came out to meet the mob leaders, warning them that this time the building was well defended by armed Breton Mobiles behind every window. This time, the Government forces under Vinoy were ready and determined.

  Despite Chaudey’s intervention, at about three o’clock two to three hundred National Guards of the 101st Battalion arrived from the Bastille, armed to the teeth, and led by such extremists as Razoua, Malon, Louise Michel, wearing a képi and clad in a man’s uniform, and the two semi-lunatics, Sapia who had led the October 8th disturbances, and Jules Allix of doigt prussique fame. They took up a menacing position in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and then a solitary shot was fired—probably, but not certainly, by the National Guard. Panic seized the crowd, and there were shouts of ‘They’re firing on us’. Sapia’s men now got down on one knee and fired a carefully directed volley into the Hôtel de Ville. There, Adjutant Bertrand, a Warrant Officer of the Finistére Mobiles who was standing just outside the gate, was hit and badly wounded. Immediately a peremptory command was given, followed by a devastating fusillade crackling out of every window in the great building. For the first time during the Siege, Frenchmen were firing at, and killing, other Frenchmen. It was a terrible omen of what was to come, and Gustave Chaudey would later die for having, presumptively, given the Mobiles the order to fire. Meanwhile, a sharp-eyed Breton levelled his sights on the gesticulating Sapia and knocked him down, mortally wounded. Jules Clarétie, a Republican journalist who had just arrived on the Place, describes how ‘the desperate crowd stampedes, tries to get away in all directions. The firing continues all the time. The windows of the Hôtel de Ville open and the Mobiles reply. People fall around me. On my left, I see a young man sink down in the yellow mud that has been diluted by a penetrating light rain; and on my right, a spectator in a top hat, killed outright.’ Louise Michel, who was to win her nickname ‘the Red Virgin’ that day, was driven to a frenzy by the sight of the mob being shot down. Firing from the cover of an overturned omnibus, she admitted shooting to kill and flayed those of her fellows who merely peppered the walls of the Hôtel de Ville. For half an hour the exchange of fire went on, until the arrival of reinforcements sent by Vinoy. The National Guard dissipated, overturning more omnibuses to cover its retreat, and leaving five dead and eighteen wounded—women and children among them—in the empty Place.

  On his way to the Hôtel de Ville that Sunday evening, to discover what was going on, Washburne met ‘an acquaintance, a young surgeon in the French Navy, who was profoundly agitated and profoundly depressed’. Telling him about the shooting, the surgeon remarked ‘that nobody knew what would come next, but that, at any rate, France was “finished”.’ Certainly it seemed that, as the Siege was running to its end, a dreadful new phase was bound to begin. In fact the January 22nd uprising had been no full-scale attempt at revolution; the numbers of the insurgents were far fewer than on October 31st; none of the principal Red leaders—Delescluze, Blanqui, Pyat, or even Flourens—was involved; and up to that day the great majority of the National Guard was still opposed to violence. But the shooting changed everything, and Paris hardened into two irreconcilable camps. Echoing the bourgeois attitude, which now saw Red revolution just round the corner, a Mobile corporal in Fort Issy (whence the 101st National Guard had once been returned because of its ‘uselessness’) wrote to his father: ‘…those miserable bastards… they are nothing but cowardly bandits far more dangerous for us than the Prussians; the Bretons fired on them—so long live the Bretons!…’ But now Vinoy did what bourgeois Paris felt Trochu should have done months ago; he ordered the suspension of Le Combat and Le Réveil, the closin
g of all the Red Clubs, and the indictment of Delescluze and Pyat before a military tribunal. (But Pyat, as always, had vanished into thin air.)

  After the January 22nd uprising, ‘civil war was a few yards away’, Jules Favre wrote in retrospect, ‘famine, a few hours’. Though he may have exaggerated the proximity of starvation (subsequent estimates suggest that there was still enough food for another ten days), the fear of civil war had suddenly become very real. Rather than attempt to fight a war on two fronts, the Government considered it imperative to obtain an armistice with the least delay. There would not even be time to consult Gambetta and the Tours Government. On the 23rd, Jules Favre called for Captain d’Hérisson, Trochu’s former staff officer, and entrusted him with a dispatch for Bismarck. He was enjoined to the utmost secrecy; ‘God only knows’, said Favre, ‘what the Parisian populace will do to us when we are compelled to tell them the truth.’ D’Hérisson sped to the parley-point on the Pont de Sèvres, where in October he had met the American generals Burnside and Forbes bound on another armistice mission to Paris. He arranged for a cease-fire at 6 o’clock that same evening, and immediately returned to collect Favre. Together they crossed the Seine in a row-boat, made dangerously leaky by bullet-holes: Favre—an incongruous figure in his top hat and badly made lawyer’s frock-coat—and d’Hérisson, immaculate in his red-striped trousers, frantically bailing with an old saucepan. On landing, Favre was escorted at once to Bismarck’s residence. ‘You have grown whiter since Ferrières, M. le Ministre’, he was greeted. Playing with the distraught old lawyer like a cat with a mouse, when Favre first mentioned with pride the resistance of Paris, Bismarck revealed the same brutality he had shown at Ferrières; ‘Ah! you are proud of your resistance? Well, sir, let me tell you that if M. Trochu were a German General I would have him shot tonight…. Do not talk to me of your resistance. It is criminal!’ That night Favre dined with Bismarck, who reported gleefully to the Crown Prince that he had ‘developed a perfectly wolfish hunger’, eating even the second night ‘a dinner intended for three’.

 

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